Daily log...

Today we started picking chardonnay. All grapes at Cardinal Point are picked by hand. Those hands usually belong to Daniel and Josefina Sanchez and the workers that they gather. It is pretty tough work though more mind numbing than muscle aching. The pickers this morning were just harvesting 220 lugs (boxes that stack so fruit isn't crushed) that I will be selling to another winery. Tomorrow rain is forecast so I want to get some fruit in. Plus I'll need to deliver this fruit and I'd rather use a rainy day for delivery as it is a wasted day for any vineyard work.

I have a lot of chardonnay, always more than I need to make wine at Cardinal Point. As I used to grow grapes and sell the fruit to other wineries, I planted more for demand than with the notion that eventually I'd be making wine myself. I planted several blocks of Chardonnay in the 90-'s when demand was high. Ironically, all the chardonnay turned out to be an impetus to go into the wine-making biz. The demand for chardonnay dropped steeply at the turn of the century. Prices were at or below what they had been in 1990. And that was if you could sell your crop at all. I let six tons of fruit rot one year as I could find no buyer. That's about 300 cases of wine! Anyway, grape growing on our scale (15 acres) just to sell fresh fruit is tough going. The profit margins became smaller each year, or the loss margins grew I should say. We needed to find a way to add value to our grapes and wine was a pretty obvious choice.

The lugs picked today probably average about 29# each. That means they picked about 3.2 tons. Starting at 7AM with just six people, they were done at 10:15! That's pretty fast. The clusters this year are larger than normal due to a really good fruit set period this past spring. The fruit itself has been abused by mother nature the past couple of weeks. Lots and lots of rain. There is a fair amount of botrytis (fungal disease that splits berries but can also improve flavor and/or cause vinification problems) but very little sour rot (bad stuff, smells and tastes like vinegar).

In the winery, both the Gewurtztraminer and Riesling are happily fermenting. Both grapes came in last week before I started this blog. The Gewurtz was grown by Dave Dexter about 15 miles south of Cardinal Point. It came in at a little over 3 tons. The Riesling is estate grown and we got over 8 tons which made me happy. Anyway, both have been pressed, settled and racked, and are now slowly fermenting in temperature controlled tanks. I find that the slower I ferment these varieties, well all varieties, the more aromatic expression I get from the resulting wine.

Got to go pick up the rental truck to deliver the grapes. More tomorrow.